In facilities such as industrial systems and buildings, various types of equipment, such as field equipment, remote I/O, power supply units, controllers, operator consoles, and the like, are used, and in facilities of a relatively large scope, such as a petrochemical plant or a building, many devices are installed across a broad area.
In consideration of maintenance for this equipment, equipment information for each equipment, such as equipment identification information and model type, established at the time of facilities planning, along with the installation date, maintenance records, and the like, for each piece of equipment, is managed in an equipment management database.
When performing maintenance on the equipment, the maintenance technician must actually go to the installation location of the equipment to perform the servicing. Because of this, it is necessary to be able to specify easily the installation location of the applicable equipment. It is particularly difficult to specify precisely the installation location of the equipment if maintenance of the equipment has not been performed for a long time, or if the maintenance technician lacks experience.
Conventionally there has been a proposal for a technology wherein various types of data that can be acquired from the equipment are collected through providing this type of equipment with a wireless communication function and communicating with each piece of equipment wirelessly. (See, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication 2003-134261). In particular, in this technology there has been a proposal for providing a location detecting function, such as a GPS, on a piece of equipment and specifying the equipment by the detected horizontal-direction installation location.
However, in this type of conventional technology, no thought is given to the installation height of the equipment, and there is a problem in that it is not possible to specify precisely the installation location of equipment installed in a high location.
It in a relatively large facility, such as a petrochemical plant or a building, in some cases the equipment may be installed in a high location of 100 m or more, such as in a distillation tower or on a building rooftop, in addition to the scope of the facility being broad. Furthermore, there are also, in practice, cases wherein a maintenance technician actually servicing an applicable piece of equipment 42 will be at a workplace P having an arbitrary height.
Because of this, even if it is possible to know the location of the equipment in the horizontal directions, such as longitude and latitude, it might still not be possible to find the applicable equipment easily, requiring wasting of effort and time, prior to starting the actual maintenance work, to find the design drawings in order to find out the installation height.
The present invention is to solve problems such as this, and the object thereof is to provide a technology for displaying equipment information able to specify precisely the installation location of equipment installed in high locations.